Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Corazón mestizo and Marcial Gala’s La Catedral de los Negros: two contributions of recent Cuban narrative towards the racial debate

Abstract

This article proposes the analysis of two works of recent Cuban literature as a reflexive exercise on racial issues. Both, published in the first decades of the 21^st century, coincide in installing, since their titles, questions about the race. On the one hand, Corazón mestizo. El delirio de Cuba by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez brings the concept of miscegenation as a definition of nationality in the context of globalization and the supposed disintegration of the fixed and compact identities that have been designing the modern thought. On the other hand, Marcial Gala's Catedral de los negros composes an uncomfortable definition with which old ghosts that were supposed to be extinct on the island seem to be awakened. In this way, we are interested in inquiring about the traces and signs that those narratives display around the racial subject, considering the peculiarities of the history of racism and racial debate in Cuba; and also the peculiarity of each book.